European collaborations fuelled by Imperial seed fund

Data privacy, particle physics and cancer prevention are some of the projects that have received a funding boost to strengthen European collaboration.

The European Partners Fund, awarded by Imperial College London, provides up to £100,000 per year for seed funds and travel grants for Imperial academics to initiate and pursue collaborations with European colleagues.

The projects cover a range of research areas such as mathematics, robotics, health, data and engineering.

This year ten projects have received funding so far to collaborate with institutions in countries including Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) Professor Nick Jennings

Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) Professor Nick Jennings said: “Collaboration across borders between academics of different nationalities produces the highest quality research and a third of our collaborators are currently from Europe. We want those relationships to grow.

“This fund allows our academics to build new relationships and work more closely with European partners. Many of these projects have already strengthened our ties with other world class institutions and the subsequent discoveries will benefit society greatly in the future.

“Imperial is a European university with global reach, and has consistently been named the UK’s most international university. We will keep supporting European and global collaborations.”

Some of the recently funded researchers discussed their projects:

Protecting Privacy

Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, from the Department of Computing, is collaborating with Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium to develop privacy tools.

The goal of the research is to help make large-scale such as mobile phones, credit cards or browsing data, more available while truly preserving privacy.